The Dems have pretty much locked the GOP out of state-wide offices. I don’t believe one is held by the Republicans. That’s going to burn us eventually, and it’s already largely started. Auditor General isn’t usually an office I worry about spewing gun control, but in this day in age, when everything is political and we all love ourselves some virtue signaling, I guess we have to worry. Points that DePasquale’s report makes that I have issues with:

Encourage doctors sticking their nose into business they have no expertise in. If I’m suicidal, I can understand a doctor asking about things in the household I could use to potentially hurt myself or others. But most people are not suicidal, and if I’m not seeking mental health treatment it’s no business of any doctor whether or not I own a firearm.

Pushes ballistic analysis which has proven in other states to be a useless waste of law enforcement resources.

Encouraging Sheriffs to check on references. The problem is information related to applications is private, and sheriffs can’t reveal information about an application to anyone. So what can they really check?

A lot of these points he makes don’t sound all that objectionable. But if you read the fine print, a lot of it is useless feel-good crap.

“Doctors’ offices should provide free information on firearm safety to all patients.”

Really? What expertise do they have on this topic. Do they teach firearms safety in medical school? No. Keep them out of this. Doctors should only have a role in this if their patients start acting crazy.

“Suicide and domestic violence should also be addressed in firearms classes.”

Again, we’re getting away from expertise here. What do firearms instructors know about suicide and domestic violence prevention, other than telling people it’s a bad idea to let crazy or violent people have access to your guns? If you ask us to hand out bullshit propaganda from the medical establishment, the answer is going to be, “No!” The place to address this is at retail, if you’re going to involve the firearms community.

“It also encourages [dealers] to display and distribute suicide prevention materials. NHFSC developed these materials based on feedback from firearms retailers.”

That’s fine, as long as it’s good material and not anti-gun propaganda. At retail is where you’re likely to encounter someone looking to harm themselves. Someone looking to off themselves isn’t going to take a class. We don’t teach people how to use a gun for that purpose in a class.

The problem with a lot of DePasquale’s recommendations is no one involved in the gun issue trusts the medical establishment, and for good reason. They are virulently anti-gun. The AMA supports a whole slew of gun control measures, including gun bans. Bloomberg could have written that position paper. So if the question is will I acquiesce to getting medicine more involved in the gun issue, the answer is “Hell No!” They’ve picked their side, and they are the enemy.

They say through interviews, investigators learned the suspects planned to get guns and bring them to school Dec. 18 at noon to shoot a student. They learned a second student volunteered to get guns from a relative.

One suspect was taken to Porter Medical Center for psychiatric counseling and treatment in the custody of DCF.

Prosecutors got an Extreme Risk Order so the guns could be seized from the other student’s relative’s home.

Woah, back up there. Let me make sure I understand this: Red Flag laws mean that if I’m targeted by a conspiracy by two individuals related to me to steal my property and misuse it, that I can lose my guns? Who’s the victim here? How can this possibly be constitutional?

Remember this: Bloomberg’s people consider this a success. A man was targeted to have his guns stolen, so the state decided to come in and steal them first. This is success, according to them. It’s how the system is supposed to work. It used to be the solution to something like this would be to lock up the thieves. Conspiracy to commit a crime is illegal, if they took any steps to further the conspiracy. Once they were on the police radar, this is what should have been done.

Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc holds several negative signals and is within a wide and falling trend, so we believe it will still perform weakly in the next couple of days or weeks. We therefore hold a negative evaluation of this stock. Due to some small weaknesses in the technical picture we have downgraded our recommendation for this stock since last evaluation from a Hold/Accumulate to a Sell Candidate.

They’ve been taking a beating, and are looking to exit the business. How stupid is Dick’s CEO? Let’s say you’re in a business where part of your business is regulated in such a way that emerging players like Amazon can’t easily compete with you. Lets also say you have some good economies of scale over mom and pop businesses that are your other main competition in that area, and can move product more efficiently and offer lower prices. Do you:

Make every effort to stay in the regulated space and keep those customers happy with your brand, so give your brick and mortar business a business line Amazon can’t touch?

Decide, in the same of Social Justice, to anger your customers in your regulated business and piss it away, leaving you to compete directly against Bezos, who eats brick and mortar stores for breakfast, in markets he finds much more favorable.

If you went with two, you’re about as stupid as Dick’s CEO. Angering gun owners and pissing away that business was about the dumbest things Dick’s could have done. You had a strong presence in a protected industry. Are you nuts?

I don’t much concern myself with what clowns say, and make no mistake: Eric Swalwell is a clown. But this should serve as notice that confiscation is no longer a fringe issue. It never has been. Don’t think just because the Senate is in Republican hands we’re safe from this. Be worried about deals on larger bills and be ready to start flooding phone banks.

One thing they want to go after is home gun smithing. This is a smart move for them. I would do this if I were them. You want to separate out and extinguish the true believers and evangelists from the casual gun owners who don’t do things like home build ARs. You’d be looking for issues where you can get the strongest believers without much protest from the average believer.

If your goal was to extinguish a religion or culture, you wouldn’t want to go after all the adherents. You go after the people who most strongly identify with and spread it. After you get them, you work on the casual people. Because you’ve gotten rid of their leaders, you have the option to either wait them out, assimilate them with your preferred culture or religion.

In any other context this would be considered a monstrous evil by the left. But not this one. Hating on gun culture gets a pass from the same people who would cry foul if we were colonizing Lebanon, and trying to convert everyone there to Christianity and American culture. But if you’re from New York City and decide to engage in a little cultural imperialism on Lebanon, Pennsylvania, well, that’s just fine.

UPDATE: He’s still digging:

Fair question. Rifles. They’re more powerful and cause more carnage when used with a pistol-grip. See @ScottPelley@60Minutes piece. To reduce semi-auto pistol deaths I’d have universal background checks and mandatory reporting on mental health.

Heller and McDonald largely put handgun bans out of the realm of legitimate discourse. Even though Heller wasn’t as strong as it could be, the Courts largely took handgun bans off the table. What we need is a strong ruling protecting rifles and accessories too.

He hasn’t done a 180 on the issue, but it looks like he’s capable of humility, which is a personality trait that will serve a person well their whole life and career. That’s my big issue with Hogg: I doubt you can tell that kid anything. At 17 he already knows everything he needs to know, and you’re just a dumb adult who won’t accept his truth. I can pretty much guarantee he’ll be the same at 40.

When it comes to politics and other social topics my position is increasingly becoming, “There are no easy answers, and if you think there are, you’ve either been duped by someone, or you’re a fool who doesn’t think things through.” What bothers me on social media is not that people overshare their political opinions… it’s that the people who tend to overshare their political opinions only see things in only black and white, and have generally closed their minds that The Truth might not be so cut and dry, or might not exist at all.

It’s never as simple as “we’re right, they’re wrong” and it definitely isn’t as simple as “we’re good, and they’re evil!”

It’s not that I don’t believe in right and wrong, and good and evil: I’ve spent more than a decade defending gun rights and trying to convince people I’m right about this. But when you start talking to real people you quickly realize there’s a lot of nuance, and none of this is as easy as you think.

Through the gun rights issue, I’ve discovered I’m a poor grassroots organizer. I tried it, but I think I suck at it. I’ve come to understand that my personality and intellectual traits are better suited to logistical support than leading troops in the field. The best organizers are actually people who believe, 100%, that they are engaged in an epic struggle between good and evil, but who are more concerned about getting a team moving forward than they are about their own self-aggrandizement. The types of people who are good at organizing will tend to struggle with that balance. Certainly most great generals have. I think Hogg will flame out, if he hasn’t already, because he trends too much toward self-aggrandizement.

Cameron Kasky is starting a new podcast “Cameron Knows Nothing.” It’s a good title. If I were starting another blog now, I might have to borrow it. I’d like to tell the kid that it’ll get better with age, but if you’re the kind of person who looks around and sees shades of grey, I’m afraid that’s only going to get worse with age.

The next big payday will come later this year when CMP starts selling thousands of M1911s, the U.S. military’s sidearm of choice for more than 70 years.

What do you want the government to do with them? Sell them to tin pot dictators? Melt them down and make flowers? This is a win-win for the government and shooting community to sell them to shooters. The hoops that must be jumped through to get one, along with the pricing, have me reluctant to get one myself.

Also note, the CMP has never sold anything that isn’t in .30 or .22LR. Handguns are a new thing, and they are selling them as an FFL rather than under their congressional charter. But these are “military weapons” that meaningless trope trotted out by people who haven’t got a clue.

At a time when Americans are sharply divided over the place of firearms in society, the U.S. government has, in effect, subsidized the metamorphosis of CMP into a deep-pocketed, nationwide evangelist for youth gun culture.

You know, you might need those kids to fight a war for you someday, and wouldn’t it be a good idea if we had some kids that, I don’t know, knew their way around a gun and could maybe hit something they aim at? I don’t have an issue with the military selling surplus to civilian shooters. They ought to subsidize marksmanship. They depend on it. If we end up in a shooting war, everyone will depend on it. They say that’s obsolete. Says who? Who decided that?

These people are not interested in public safety. They are interested in frustrating and then ending the shooting sports and shooting culture. That’s the goal. You’d have to be blind not to see it.

I haven’t worn Levi’s jeans since I was in my 20s, when I found out they donated to anti-gun causes. They were on NRA’s “blacklist” of anti-gun companies back in the day. When I do wear jeans, I wear Lee. But mostly I wear “Work Khakis” by Carthartt. They hold up pretty well even for doing real work, and they are more comfortable in the summer than jeans. The cell phone pocket is nice too.

The WaPo has an article about how Christian Nationalism, as WaPo misdefines it, is a strong predictor for whether you believe in gun control or not. The idea that rights come from God didn’t originate in Jerry Fawell’s basement. It originated during the enlightenment. The whole idea of natural rights it nothing new. The people who wrote the Second Amendment were very highly influenced by the works of John Locke who died in 1704. The whole article reads like “can you believe people are crazy enough to believe this stuff?” Christian Nationalism was actually a thing, founded by Gerald Smith and peaking the 1940s, but its chief philosophy was highly anti-Semitic and racist, a trait you seldom find today in mainstream religious conservatives. So how does WaPo misdefine this?

“The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation.”

“The federal government should advocate Christian values.”

“The federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state” (reverse-coded).

“The federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces.”

“The success of the United States is part of God’s plan.”

“The federal government should allow prayer in public schools.”

OK. That could possibly mean you’re a dominionist, especially if you answer yes to number one. But even I think the federal government should allow, and actually think it is compelled by the First Amendment to allow, prayer in public schools as long as the schools aren’t compelling it. I even agree that the federal government should allow display of religious symbols in public places as long as the state didn’t put it there, or it doesn’t represent any establishment of religion (like Moses being on the Supreme Court building). And what Christian values are we talking about here? I’m OK with the state promoting not killing, treating other people as you wish to be treated, etc. Am I OK with the federal government forcing people to go to church? No. Am I OK with laws against blaspheming other people’s faith? No. But if you answer yes to most of these, it doesn’t make you a “Christian Nationalist.” Christian Nationalism was disgusting. Conflating mainstream Christian beliefs with that philosophy is wrong. Sadly, most journalists these days know almost nothing about what these philosophies are, where they came from, and what their intellectual roots are.

A coalition of gun control groups are embarking on an epic fundraising effort battle with the Trump Administration to hopefully scare some money out of their base. I was wondering what Bloomberg could want with something like this, because it’s very unlikely to win, and even if it does, it’s not like they are going to put the genie in the bottle. But it’s probably something that will scare up the base and help money flow into the other gun control groups that need the money. This is about raising awareness for Everytown: ground prep for a future fight if they get a pretext. For the other groups it’s fundraising.

Bloomberg is making home building a target. I follow their “Trace” publication, and for a while after State’s announcement, it’s all they’ve been talking about. I don’t like fighting on ground where you have a very small handful of people engaging in something lawful, but hard for other people and even other gun owners to understand. But the idea that they can stop this is absurd on its face.

Does anyone think a law against home gunsmithing is going to stop criminals and terrorists from getting plans, that are still freely available on the Internet, from loading them up and hitting “print?” The idea that you can shut down Cody Wilson’s free speech, even if it was legal, is an evil thing no free society should do.

The Administration has decided to Make Tinkering Great Again, and I’m not going to object. The lords of the manors don’t like the idea of their serfs doing powerful things that they have absolutely no control over. The risk for us is that home gun smithing, and possibly even home 3D printing, will be stamped out by elites trying to wrest control back from the unwashed masses. As I mentioned before, just because it’s an absurd and useless law doesn’t mean they won’t pass it. The goal isn’t really to stop crime. It’s to stop you… you flyover rube.